Cut Grass

Leaf 140 – Looking Back

 

Harry Wingfield - Talk about the Garden (1976)

Another nostalgic memory of growing up in the UK …

 

 

My seventh summer

borne on the breeze

– petrol and cut grass.

 

 

 

Harry Wingfield - The Shed (Helping at Home 1961)

Silver Tops

Leaf 139 – Looking Back

 

Ronald Lampitt - The Door-Step Milk Thief (1966)

When I was growing up in the UK, our milk used to be delivered early in the morning by a milkman from the local dairy, driving a ‘milk float.’ This was an electric vehicle which used to trundle through the streets slowly and silently, except for a low whir from its motor and the soft chink of glass bottles when it came to a stop. The milkman used to leave the pint-sized bottles of milk on the doorstep during the early hours, usually before the residents of the street were out of bed. Opening the front door to fetch the milk for breakfast, along with collecting the post from the doormat, were the first tasks of the day. Sometimes in the winter, however, you might find that someone else had beaten you to it. The milk bottles were sealed with colour-coded tin foil: Silver for full cream; Silver and Red Stripes for semi-skimmed; Red for skimmed. If the foil was pierced it was a sure sign that your milk had been raided by a blue tit. These small birds were adept at poking a hole in the foil in order to get at the cream which naturally rose to the top of the milk bottle. Discovering the milk had been cheekily raided in this manner was always something which brought a smile to our faces.

 

 

Early bird

catches the cream

– winter sunrise.

 

 

Harry Wingfield - The Milkman (1962)

Empty Lighthouses

Leaf 138 – Art Inspired

 

These three haiku can either be read independently, or as a triptych of linked verse. Loosely inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), which I first read for my English A-level. I have re-read Woolf’s masterpiece several more times over the years since. It is one of my favourite works of fiction. Although it is supposedly set in Scotland’s Isle of Skye, Woolf actually based the story’s locale on her family’s holidays at St. Ives in Cornwall. My own family also has a long tradition of holidaying in Cornwall, which is where I spent all of my summers growing up. Hence, lighthouses have long held a fascination for me. I remember feeling quite sad when, as a child, I learned that all of the lighthouses built in the more remote areas of the UK’s rugged coastline had been automated. The lonely idea of a lighthouse keeper’s job rather appealed to me. Hence the last of these poems in particular meditates on the thoughts and feelings of a retired lighthouse keeper, as I imagine them. With our man still tuning in and listening to the late night shipping forecast in his retirement; as well as the nostalgic resonances of Ronald Binge’s ‘Sailing By’ (1963), which has long been played alongside the shipping forecast at midnight each day on BBC Radio 4, before turning out his bedside lamp and going to sleep at night. Safely knowing that those powerful lights will still be sweeping their broad arms out over the seas around the British Isles from those elegant but ghostly unmanned towers.

 

 

Automated moonlight

dapples the dark sea,

beneath its white beam.

 

 

A brush of light,

sweeping across

the windowpane.

 

 

Retired lighthouse keeper

– counting the pips,

after ‘Sailing By.’

 

 

Ronald Binge - Sailing By (1963) Alan Perry/William Gardner Orchestra

 

Godrevy Lighthouse, St. Ives, Cornwall. Photograph credits: Wikimedia / Geograph

These poems were originally posted on Bluesky in response to a #blueskyrelay writing prompt: 'lighthouse.'

Starry Sky

Leaf 137 – Art Inspired

 

Vincent Van Gogh - Starry Night (1889) Museum of Modern Art, New York

Temporarily rounding off the “art inspired” theme explored over the course of the last three leaves (Leaf 134; Leaf 135; Leaf 136), this poem isn’t so much about one particularly well-known painting – but more about that white cube in which we now expect to see paintings and artworks. Both physical and conceptual, four white walls, a wooden floor, and an unconscious skylight receding somewhere overhead. To me, such ubiquitous art gallery spaces always seem to echo in my mind with an image of the cerebral interior of the human skull.

 

 

A starry sky

staring back

– a stark white wall.

 

 

 

Sunflowers

Leaf 136 – Art Inspired

 

Vincent Van Gogh - Sunflowers (1888) National Gallery London

Following on from my last two poems, this one continues the “art inspired” theme, something which I often cycle back to when I attempt to write short poems. This one reflects upon the relationships between artists, art, and creativity. These relationships can be complex – psychologically and socially – and often seem to result in skewed perspectives. I think one of the most difficult things in both life and art is not so much the ability to see clearly, but perhaps more the ability to see eye-to-eye.

 

 

Heads so bright, but heavy –

painting sunflowers

for Paul Gauguin.

 

 

 

Linear Mandala

Leaf 135 – Art Inspired

 

This poem is another attempt to synthesise my fascination for the paintings of Jackson Pollock (see Leaf 134). There has been a lot of speculation about what first sparked Pollock’s creative “breakthrough” and his subsequent pursuit of his famous drip paintings – was it simply accidental, staring down at his paint spattered studio floor, or a more carefully considered painterly synthesis of Navajo artistic designs and Buddhist sand mandala techniques, or something else entirely? 

 

Jackson Pollock - Summertime: Number 9A (1948) Tate Modern

 

Brush tipped,

a linear mandala

falls.

 

 

 

Is he the greatest?

Leaf 134 – Art Inspired

 

Jackson Pollock - Blue Poles (1952) National Gallery of Australia

This poem is an attempt to synthesise my fascination for the paintings of Jackson Pollock (see also, Leaf 135). I first became interested in Pollock around the time that the biopic, starring Ed Harris, was in the cinema (Pollock, 2000). I went to see it at the Barbican in London. I also read a book about Pollock’s works, borrowed from my local library in Stoke Newington around the same time, which really grabbed a hold of my mind and has stayed with me. This poem riffs off of the famous article about Pollock from 1949, published in Life Magazine, which asked: ‘Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ – I find it curious how so much of modern art in the West is based upon a kind of cult of personality. It seems to me that inherent talent often needs to be refracted through a prism of personality before it can attain any sort of permanence. Common cultural outlooks tend towards a systematic second-order need to categorise and compartmentalise, a priori or a posteriori – but there is something in the structured vs. erratic mix of expression which characterises Pollock’s most famous works, and those of prominent jazz musicians with whom he was a contemporary, which I think manages to wink at this and simply content itself with doing its own thing, regardless. And that’s what I like most about Pollock, Coltrane, and Davis. For me, at least – it’s more about being guided by feeling, and less about thinking.

 

 

Is he the greatest?

 

Blue Poles

Blue Train

Kind of Blue.

 

 

 

John Coltrane - Blue Train (1958)

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (1959)

Hans Namuth - Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner (1950)